ORATORY

Oratory in the United States died out, some have said, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Millions of people, eager to rise during Reconstruction and in reform movements between the Civil War and World War I, however, were learning to read and write. They were founding, buying, and poring over affordable and widely available journals, newspapers, and books. They were honing elements of elocution and speechmaking in common schools and public universities. How could oratory be dead if so many new speakers performed it and audiences yearned for it? The literature at the turn of the twentieth century represents this American struggle over the public podium.

Emblematic of that struggle was a young Yankton Sioux woman who beat out all white students, both men and women, in the 1899 student oratory contest at Earlham College. Zitkala-Ša (also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, 1876-1938) was surprised at receiving friendly overtures from her usually distant white classmates after the speech. A few weeks later, she won an intercollegiate meet, this time under a banner that mocked her Quaker school for allowing a "squaw" to represent it. Zitkala-Ša's autobiographical narrative, "School Days of an Indian Girl," was published by the Atlantic Monthly in 1900, a few months after these oratorical contests. These events suggest several aspects of what was at stake for oratory in U.S. literary culture of the time. At the end of the nineteenth century, exemplary performance of public oratory continued to signal academic success. In Zitkala-Ša's case, the prize honored mastery of speech conventions by a person until then considered an outsider to mainstream culture. Success at the Earlham and intercollegiate podium, moreover, was every bit as significant to Zitkala-Ša as the later print appearance of her autobiographical essay in a prestigious periodical. One marked her earliest public mastery of a powerful medium of dominant culture; the other signaled her literary success with an even broader public. Fine students of higher learning won prizes for oratory. Fine writers were published in the Atlantic Monthly.

That a young American Indian woman managed both, however, suggests that issues of oratory had shifted away from questions asked before and during the Civil War: Plain or elaborate language? Logic of sensationalist epistemology and the mental faculties, or flat assertions of fact? Instead, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the questions concerned who got to speak to the American public: Men only, or women too? Just whites, or also blacks, Indians, and other people of color? Oratory in literature and as an art in its own right foregrounded questions of ethos, the speaker, the rhetor.

SENSATIONAL OR PLAIN SPEECH?

Earlier questions about oratory were most famously articulated in two vastly different orations delivered 19 November 1863 by Abraham Lincoln and Edward Everett, dedicating the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg. The difference was not just that one speech was two minutes and the other two hours. Following Lincoln's brief remarks, what has become the preferred rhetorical—and literary—style includes a self-deprecating humility, echoes of a rural American lifestyle, and at the same time an appeal to lofty, universal values. In "The American Scholar" (1837), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) had famously avowed, "I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low" (p. 113). But not too low.

Like Lincoln, Walt Whitman (1819–1892) used biblical cadences and plain diction in his poems. The 1891 final, deathbed version of Leaves of Grass includes even more parataxis than earlier texts; for example, part 33 of "Song of Myself" embraces all with these lines:

Pleas'd with the native and pleas'd with the foreign, pleas'd with the new and the old,

Pleas'd with the homely woman as well as the handsome,

Pleas'd with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously,

Pleas'd with the tune of the choir of the white-wash'd church,

Pleas'd with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, impress'd seriously at the camp meeting, . . .

(Pp. 54–55)

Piling up pleasures in parallel sentence structure, Whitman fully enjoys "the familiar, the low," as Emerson directed. While Whitman is "pleas'd with the quakeress" who speaks up for herself and others in public, and he is impressed with the Methodist minister, it may be this preacher's sweat more than his oratory that moves the great "mother-man" of the American people, for the poet claims in section 30 of the same 1891 edition,

Logic and sermons never convince,

The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

(P. 50)

The preacher's passionate life of the body conveyed with "earnest words" invokes his hearers' own experiences, their damp and dark nights of the soul. Whitman's accordion-like psalmic catalogs of human experience announced a new egalitarian American eloquence, both oratorical and literary, that has affected speakers and writers into the twentieth century.

SHAPING PUBLIC SENTIMENT

Not that the rhetoric of sentiment was done for—far from it. When Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) publicly exhorted a mixed-race, mixed-gender crowd honoring the 1875 centennial of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, she aimed to shape a new social sentiment of justice by use of appeals directed simultaneously at her audience's passions, intellect, imagination, and will. A far from perfect Reconstruction, she asserted, was in fact reproducing the horrors of slavery:

I do not believe there is another civilized nation under Heaven where there are half so many people who have been brutally and shamefully murdered, with or without impunity, as in this republic within the last ten years. And who cares? Where is the public opinion that has scorched with red-hot indignation the cowardly murderers of Vicksburg and Louisiana? . . . What we need today in the onward march of humanity is a public sentiment in favor of common justice, and simple mercy, . . . a sense of humanity, which shall crystallize into the life a nation the sentiment that justice, simple justice, is the right, not simply of the strong and powerful, but of the weakest and feeblest of all God's children; a deeper and broader humanity, which will teach men to look upon their feeble breth[r]en not as vermin to be crushed out, or beasts of burden to be bridled and bitted, but as the children of the living God. (Harper, p. 220)

Born a free black in Baltimore, Harper had traveled the abolitionist circuit since 1854 when the Maine Anti-Slavery Society commissioned her to present speeches she often crowned with her own poems. It was still rare for a woman to speak in public, but Harper's oratory resounded in countless public meetings all over the North arousing sentiments of "red-hot indignation" in order to end chattel slavery. After the war, as an itinerant teacher of newly freed slaves in the South, she saw firsthand ongoing racial oppression that enslaved her people all over again, terrorizing them into submission with mob violence and lynching. Discourse punctuated with sentence fragments, question marks, and parallel adjectives describing both the oppressors and the oppressed among "God's children," as well as alliteration in the metaphor "beasts of burden to be bridled and bitted"—these rhetorical strategies of sentimentalism still effectively touched audience passions in much public oratory during and after Reconstruction. Harper was herself upset, her agitated text indicates, and she undoubtedly meant to upset any complacent souls in her audience, moving them to change their ways and American culture. Along with other reformers who had designs on public sentiment, she kept using sentimental strategies on the podium and in print right into the twentieth century. These strategies mark her most famous work, Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), a staple of nineteenth century American novel studies, which among other issues includes class tensions in the racial uplift movement.

Oratory and rhetorical tactics have had to do with issues of economics and class since before 400 b.c.e. when Sophists trained Greek litigants trying to recover Athenian property from victors of ancient wars. Although rhetorical theory that informed prevailing nineteenth-century U.S. discourse turned away from classical topics and deductive thinking to induction and experience, questions about material context—something like the cases in antiquity—were also asked. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers had asserted the rights and worth of individuals over monarchy and privilege, and studies of rhetoric (both for oratory and writing) were afterward available to students from a rising middle class. It is no accident that Enlightenment theories of knowledge grew not from the logic of hierarchical authority but from sensory impressions recorded in each person's mind. This epistemology was premised on everyone's perceptions—up and down the social strata—being the same, a "common sense" or universal faculty psychology. A sensationalist rhetoric was then devised to appeal to an audience's mental faculties in order to shape public moral sentiment.

The rhetoric of sentiment was elaborated into a comprehensive system most famously by the Scottish professors George Campbell (1719–1796) and Hugh Blair (1718–1800) in the late eighteenth century. Their texts—including chapbook abridgements, revisions, and knock-offs of them—appeared in colleges, on bookshelves, and in the hip pockets of newly literate U.S. citizens throughout the nineteenth century. As Campbell and Blair taught up-and-coming offspring of British merchants to parley with nobility, seminary students to preach with taste, and lawyers to win in courts and legislatures, the rhetoric of sentiment spread even more widely among all strata of U.S. citizenry. Sentimentalism was a web of shared lore about how to appeal to the public mind and so to pressure the powers that be. Discovery of just such a chap-book, The Columbian Orator (1797), inspired Frederick Douglass (c. 1818–1895) to flee slavery, and the persistent strength of oratory may be measured by his ease with the medium at century's end; in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881; revised 1892), Douglass claims "that writing for the public eye never came quite as easily to me as speaking to the public ear" (p. 397). Another well-known orator, Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), penned the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" lyrics in 1861, but only in the last decades of the nineteenth century, after her husband's death, did she become a stump speaker for women's rights and pacifism. In her 1899 Reminiscences, 1819–1899, Howe confesses a continued fondness for Blair's 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, "with its many quotations from the poets" (p. 57) to rate persuasive strategies that could move the heart and mind.

Relative status and economic issues arose also in the mixed reviews accorded the standard Enlightenment rhetorics by writers who are now thought of as literary giants, such as Herman Melville (1819–1891). In Billy Budd, Foretopman (1924), Melville does admit that public address by Captain Vere is sometimes delivered "in clear terms and concise," yet the writer expresses his doubts about Vere's rhetoric when the captain's cloud of courtroom verbiage seals the fate of his young sailor Billy Budd, accused of murder. Vere's declamation on the incident deploys "a certain pedantry socially alleged," which obscures the liability of either sailor charged with the crime (p. 2341). In effect, the captain's foggy oratory dooms the boy to execution.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) became the best known and most prolific black woman speaker, poet, novelist, and essayist of her day. In "The Greater Problem to Be Solved," she addresses the 1875 centennial conference of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Chattel slavery ended with the Civil War, but she urges abolitionists to take up the next great cause: not only to find compassion for all but to assert the rights of all.

What we need to-day in the onward march of humanity is a public sentiment in favor of common justice and simple mercy. We have a civilization which has produced grand and magnificent results, diffused knowledge, overthrown slavery, made constant conquests over nature, and built up a wonderful material prosperity. But two things are wanting in American civilization—a keener and deeper, broader and tenderer sense of justice [and] a sense of humanity, which shall crystallize into the life of a nation the sentiment that justice, simple justice, is the right not simply of the strong and powerful, but of the weakest and feeblest of all God's children.

Harper, "The Greater Problem to Be Solved," p. 220.

Another anti-pedant, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) notoriously did not stand with first-year Mt. Holyoke classmates when a preacher urged them to show their souls had been saved. In her poems, unpublished except for a handful until after her death in 1886, Dickinson finds oratory still feeding her doubts. Politicians (such as perhaps her father, a U.S. Congressman from Massachusetts) receive even harsher criticism than preachers: "How dreary – to be – Somebody! / How public – like a Frog –." Dickinson's critique of political stump speeches makes the politician a low amphibian. His message consists of one thing, his name. The orator's audience ("an admiring Bog"), with its affinity for muck, is granted no sentience at all. This reclusive poet was no fan of sensational political oratory.

Sensational political orations—political stump speeches—came in for similar criticism by another nineteenth-century writer. Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) panned the genre unmercifully in his text of comic oratory "Cannibalism in the Cars"(1875). In it Clemens exposes aggressions latent in tricky speechifying. His oral tale within a tale cloaks behind mock legislative deliberations that snowbound, hungry railway passengers are choosing which of their fellow travelers will be the main course. These train-wrecked strangers, all men, are adrift in an amoral "world of eddying flakes shutting out the firmament above" (p. 41). Harrumphing at "proceedings . . . in every way, irregular and unbecoming," Reverend James Sawyer of Tennessee objects not to eating or being eaten, but to lack of a chairman and subordinates to run the meeting; he insists all previous actions (nominating him) are invalid until officers have been elected. Mr. Belknap of Iowa argues, "This is no time to stand upon forms and ceremonious observances," declaring himself and "every gentleman present" to be "satisfied with the nominations" and ready to elect Sawyer for breakfast (p. 42). The representative from Tennessee must either put up a fight, a sign he is no gentleman, or shut up and be eaten. He does employ a diversionary tactic that takes him off the menu, but it does not prevent him and seven survivors from consuming sixteen others. Darwin's description of dog-eat-dog competition necessary for earthly survival of the fittest (in On the Origin of Species, 1859) becomes in Clemens's imagination a nightmare of human cannibalism, horrific with orderly government machinations that chew up humanity with gear teeth. From legislature or pulpit, the speechifying said to crown civilization Clemens's reveals instead as a means to bestial ends.

The height of Clemens's admiration for successful mocking oratory turned up in his own "flyting," a centuries-old traditional speech competition of bragging and foolery, often performed by men as after-dinner entertainment. Clemens famously delivered such pieces at Oxford when he was awarded an honorary doctorate there in 1907. The depth of his abhorrence for manipulative "blattering" also appears in his "War Prayer" (1904). A kind of fable, this short narrative focuses on political war oratory in "packed mass meetings" called to whip up "devotion to flag and country" (p. 3). Every night the crowds "listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest depths of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while" (p. 3). Clemens's contemporary, William Jennings Bryan, aroused crowds with just such populist oratory in 1896, winning the first of three Democratic Party presidential nominations with his "Cross of Gold" speech, in which he championed silver to back common currency versus the gold standard favored by big banks and big business. The panting, the open hearts, cyclones of applause, and tears in Clemens's crowd are the bodily affect looked for by sensationalist rhetoric as evidence that a speaker has moved an audience to accept his or her message.

A few local dissenters in Clemens's story, warned not to "cast a doubt" on the war's "righteousness," have absented themselves from the patriotic gatherings (p. 5). But a robed Merlin-like stranger steps to the pulpit, motioning the minister to step side after a long militaristic prayer for the troops. It seems the second speaker brings an answer from God to the pastor's prayer for victory, that is, if the people still endorse the prayer after the messenger unfolds its implications. The stranger observes that their prayer really asks the Almighty to make "bloody shreds" (p. 33) of the other side's men. God should scatter the foe's bodies over "smiling fields" (p. 35), burn their homes with "a hurricane of fire" (p. 39), and turn out their widows and children who will then bitterly also pray to God "for the refuge of the grave and [be] denied it—for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord" (p. 51). One side wins, but winning begets terrible tragedy for the vanquished, Clemens's messenger reminds the congregation. Reflecting on the carnage of war in his long lifetime, the author asks patriots what kind of perverse pulpit oratory and prayer tells believers that the Source of Love takes only "our" side? One might conclude that Clemens, like many of his day, excoriated all oratory. His mysterious stranger's message, however, may simply underscore a challenge raised at the turn of the twentieth century specifically against overwrought rhetoric and an unreflective public.

NOT HOW—BUT WHO—CAN SPEAK?

At the end of the nineteenth century, the cause of peace called to the podium a host of other unexpected earnest messengers, women among them. Outspoken advocates of reform in education, prisons, temperance, women's suffrage, and especially the abolition of slavery, a handful of women of color such as Frances Harper and some very few white Quaker women had been speaking in public since the late 1820s. The women's club movement in the 1870s gave semipublic audiences to many middle- and upper-class white women, and they soon stepped into the public eye. With larger numbers of women and other newly confident speakers at the podium, the style of a speech became less important than its underlying ethos or who delivered it. At the end of the century, Julia Ward Howe recalled her 1872 Peace Crusade, a series of speeches she delivered from British pulpits and podiums. She wrote of that campaign, "My dominant thought was that women, as the mothers of men, alone knew the cost of human life, and that this fact gave them a sacred and indisputable right to become the guardians of the world's peace" ("Change in the Position of Women," p. 148). A widely held belief that mothers held the moral high ground influenced Howe's "dominant thought." This premise evoked for her the vision of "a mighty and august Congress of Mothers, which should constitute a new point of departure for the regeneration of society by the elimination of the selfish and brutal elements which lead to war and bloodshed" ("Change in the Position of Women," pp. 148–149). Howe's Latinate diction and long, balanced periodic sentences show off a privileged education gained in large part from her older brothers' tutors. Yet, the venerable pacifist matron urging peace and women's rights upon turn-of-the- twentieth-century Boston clashes with the writer of erotic poems in Passion-Flowers (1854) and of lyrics for "Battle Hymn of the Republic" (1862).

Rhetorical theory, with implications for women's education and their participation in public oratory, was advanced at the turn of the twentieth century by Gertrude Buck (1871–1922), a self-described "hopeless radical" who held one of the first doctorates awarded a woman and who taught and wrote for many years at Vassar (Ritchie and Ronald, p. 211). An ethics of cooperation, collaboration, and social responsibility grounded her view of rhetoric. Mary August Jordan (1855–1941), likewise, encouraged supporters of women's rights and her women students at Smith College to be socially responsible "restless disturbers" of the status quo in rhetorical practice (Ritchie and Ronald, p. 218). Reforms in rhetorical theory advocated by these middle-class white women had broad application. But their ranks were thin, and their audiences among the most privileged in the country. As early as 1866, speaking to the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, Frances Harper pulled the rug out from under any myth of white motherhood as a foundation for participation in public practices such as oratory and voting: "I do not believe that white women are dewdrops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent" (Harper, p. 218). Because she stood with her people for black men's right to vote, recognized by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, Harper broke with the convention's call for women's (meaning white women's) suffrage first. Among its racial uplift themes, Harper's novel Iola Leroy is believed to celebrate the astonishing courage of another African American woman, Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), a columnist with the pen name Iola who was editor and part owner at age twenty-seven of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper and a tireless public speaker on behalf of anti-lynching laws.

A high point of resistance to women's oratory, and in retrospect perhaps a sign of women's increasing numbers as public speakers, was Henry James's (1843–1916) 1886 novel, The Bostonians. While protagonist Basil Ransom is at first pejoratively described as a "lean, pale, sallow, shabby" figure from conquered Mississippi when he arrives at his wealthy female cousin's doorstep expecting a job (p. 4), Ransom's "provincial" view of female activism and of oratory drives the novel's plot (p. 11). Olive Chancellor is keeper of the family wealth, benefactor of women's rights, and Ransom's chief rival for the affections of Verena Tarrant, a rising prodigy on the women's rights scene. Driven by her causes, Olive is "morbid," the visiting cousin tells himself. James repeats the adjective five times in five lines to underscore his point about this female activist and perhaps to suggest his own fascinated aversion to same-sex living arrangements springing up among Boston women. From his perspective, Miss Olive "hated men, as a class" (p. 22). When Verena at last speaks to a parlor gathering of women activists, she charms the crowd and Ransom, too. Verena casts her spell with "those charming notes of her voice," Ransom believes, and not with "the argument, the doctrine" (p. 61). Not incidentally, James would later deliver a long graduation speech on women's vocal tone to the Smith College class of 1905. Ransom asserts of Verena's topic, "She didn't mean it, she didn't know what she meant, she had been stuffed with this trash by her father" (p. 62). She is manipulated, Ransom thinks, as a "preposterous puppet" mouthing others' thoughts (p. 336). So he sets out to prove the young star orator's lack of conviction and "hollowness of character" (p. 62) by persuading her to the exact opposite position, his own: females are made for men's private pleasure and not to address the public good. He insinuates himself into Verena's affections and carries her off to marry him moments before she would have spoken for the first time in a public hall. The book's sensational ending reads like a fantasy that, though thwarted by later feminist movements, articulates a powerful challenge to women's participation in U.S. oratory and public life.

SPEAKING ON THE COLOR LINE

Two famous exchanges of the late nineteenth century underscore the shift from rhetorical style and theory to an emphasis on who gets to speak. Both exchanges occurred at first in speeches, and both mark the breadth of the expanded public podium. Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) spoke both from the podium and in print about what approach African American people should take to mainstream American cultural power. Chief Joseph (In-mut-too-yah-lat-lkekht in his tribal language, 1840–1904) appealed to dignitaries in Washington, D.C., for his people's return from exile in Kansas and Oklahoma to traditional lands in the Pacific Northwest.

Booker T. Washington famously advocated at the Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895 that by self-help and solidarity his people could gain pride and yet accommodate southern white supremacy and separation of the races. From the speech as it appears in his autobiography Up from Slavery (1901), blacks should seek only training for industrial and agricultural work and so, according to Washington, "put brains and skill into the common occupations of life." In 1881 he had founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a school for vocational education and teacher training. He likened his people to a ship lost at sea that arrives at the mouth of the Amazon River and yet can find no fresh water; "cast down your bucket where you are," he said (p. 514). Washington also likened that ship to whites, who should continue to support institutions like Tuskegee and hire its graduates, rather than immigrants, so that "in the future, as in the past, . . . you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen." And blacks, as potential employees, should cultivate "friendly relations with the Southern white man" (p. 515). Not racial equality, but a measure of economic opportunity, Washington argued, would eventually allow blacks to earn respect from white leaders.

In the last years of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois could not endorse Washington's quietism at African Americans' continued exclusion from political power, civil rights, and higher education. For "it practically accepts the alleged inferiority" (p. 639) of blacks, he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of Du Bois's speeches and published writings. Raised by the extended family of a single mother in Massachusetts, trained in public school and then at Fisk University and Harvard as an undergraduate, Du Bois studied in Berlin and earned a doctorate in history from Harvard in 1895. Giving credit to the complex context and real accomplishments of Washington's agenda, Du Bois nevertheless maintained that neither flattery nor jobs could adequately help black people, but "straightforward honesty" and "firm adherence to their higher ideals and aspirations will ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility" (p. 640). Du Bois articulated a "double-consciousness" in blacks' self-perception as one effect of "the color-line" that he prophesied would dominate the American twentieth century. And he urged a return to Frederick Douglass's ideal of "ultimate assimilation through self-assertion" of black identity as a means to equality in all spheres of cultural life (p. 637). At issue for these two leaders was not "Who can speak?" from a public platform, but "Who are we as African Americans?" in American politics.

Harper's Weekly and the North American Review made popular the oratorical mastery of Chief Joseph and the plight of his Nez Percé people displaced from tribal lands by the Oregon gold rush and later settlers. After a seven-hundred-mile dash for the Canadian border marked by one Indian victory after another over astonishing odds, Joseph's fellow chiefs were dead. Believing he had negotiated safe passage to a reservation for his tribal remnant, Joseph gave up the fight, and the surrender speech he delivered was published in the 17 November 1877 issue of Harper's Weekly:

I want to have time to look for my children and see now many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs, my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more against the white man. (P. 906)

In violation of the treaty, the U.S. government divided his tribal unit, with Joseph and his followers herded into boxcars bound for Kansas and then Oklahoma. Two years later, an honest officer present at the surrender arranged passage for Joseph to the nation's capitol where at Lincoln Hall the chief recounted his people's history to President Rutherford B. Hayes and congressional leaders. This speech (published in the North American Review in April 1879) was perhaps more famous in its day than even his surrender because it details an Indian's perspective of settlers coming to eastern Oregon. "Some of you think an Indian is like a wild animal. This is a great mistake. I will tell you all about our people, and then you can judge whether an Indian is a man or not," Joseph began. Echoing principles of Christian morality, but in the name of the Great Spirit who "is looking at me, and will hear me" (p. 260). Joseph described the encroachment of outsiders into the Wallowa Valley:

I learned then that we were but few, while the white men were many, and that we could not hold our own with them. We were like deer. They were like grizzly bears. We had a small country. Their country was large. We were contented to let things remain as the Great Spirit Chief made them. They were not; and would change the rivers and mountains if they did not suit them. (P. 267)

In the kind of twist that the new century's literary modernism would enjoy, Enlightenment ideals played a dual role surrounding Joseph's speech, revealing the limitations of those ideals. Enlightenment notions were urging individual settlers to go west and rise in the world, while these ideals were also endorsing free speech and the mass marketing of Joseph's public address criticizing white settlement. Joseph maintained,

If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. (P. 282)

In response to this appeal, public sentiment finally shifted, pressing for return of the Nez Percé in 1885 to a reservation near their homeland. Still, before his death, Joseph was permitted only one visit to his father's grave in the Wallowa Valley.

If oratory died toward the end of the nineteenth century, it is good riddance to a formulaic, deductive version of public rhetoric that displayed classical tropes and figures familiar only to those who could learn Latin and Greek. Engaging first an elaborate new inductive rhetoric of sentiment and then rustic appeal and a plain tone, a more diverse American public would read, write, and claim space upon the podium of the coming twentieth century.

see alsoLectures; Presidential Elections; Reform; Women's Suffrage

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons (Zitkala-Ša). "School Days of an Indian Girl." Atlantic Monthly 85 (1900): 185–194.

Chief Joseph (In-mut-too-yah-lat-lkekht). "I Will Fight No More." Harper's Weekly 21 (17 November 1877): 906.

Chief Joseph (In-mut-too-yah-lat-lkekht). "An Indian's View of Indian Affairs." North American Review (April 1879): 412–434. In Indian Oratory: Famous Speeches by Noted Indian Chieftains, edited by W.C. Vanderwerth, pp. 259–284. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971.

Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain). "Cannibalism in the Cars." 1875. New Literary History 29, no. 1 (1998): 39–45.

Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain). "War Prayer." In Europe and Elsewhere. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923. Reprinted as The War Prayer. Edited by John Groth. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. Page citations are from the latter edition.

Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. 1881; revised 1892. In Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay, pp. 391–401. New York: Norton, 1997.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. In Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay, pp. 613–740. New York: Norton, 1997.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The American Scholar." In The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson. New York: Modern Library, 1950. Quoted in Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, p. 113.

Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. "The Greater Problem to Be Solved." In A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, edited by Frances Smith Foster, pp. 219–222. New York: Feminist Press, 1990.

Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. "We Are All Bound Up Together." In A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, edited by Frances Smith Foster, pp. 217–219. New York: Feminist Press, 1990.

Howe, Julia Ward. "The Change in the Position of Women." In The Woman Suffrage Movement, edited by Florence Howe Hall, pp. 136–151. Boston: Dana Estes and Company, 1913. Essay on Howe's earlier Peace Crusade speeches.

Howe, Julia Ward. Reminiscences: 1819–1899. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899.

James, Henry. The Bostonians. New York and London: Macmillan and Co., 1886.

Melville, Herman. "Billy Budd, Foretopman." 1924. Reprinted as "Billy Budd, Sailor" in Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. 1, 3rd ed., edited by Nina Baym, Ronald Gottesman, Laurence B. Holland, David Kalstone, Francis Murphy, Hershel Parker, William H. Pritchard, Patricia B. Wallace, pp. 2300–2355. New York: Norton, 1989.

Washington, Booker T. "Up from Slavery." In Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay, pp. 490–521. New York: Norton, 1997.

Whitman, Walt. "Song of Myself." 1891. In his Leaves of Grass, pp. 25–76. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1926.

Secondary Works

Berlin, James. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

Clark, Gregory, and S. Michael Halloran, eds. Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.

Cmiel, Kenneth. Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: William Morrow, 1990.

Herzberg, Bruce, and Patricia Bizzell, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.

Johnson, Nan. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1886–1910. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

Logan, Shirley Wilson. "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.

Mattingly, Carol. Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.

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Wendy Dasler Johnson